LEGENDARY phonies featuring Matt Canik!

Ever wonder what happens when you play something in Scrabble that's not a word? Well... sometimes it stays on the board! These are some especially ridiculous nonwords that stays on the board, all played by top expert Matt Canik.
Matthew Tunnicliffe's phonies: • 5 OUTRAGEOUS nonwords ...
Josh Sokol's phonies: • The legendary phonies ...
Even more phonies: • Even more HILARIOUS Sc...

[@danielzitnik4247]

2:30 I really think you should have mentioned fiefdom IS a real word when covering feofdom. Thanks for the content, I enjoy these historical videos.

[@mackmeller]

Ah, great point. I thought of FEOFF as resembling FEOF but FEOFFDOM* is also bogus, but didn't think of FIEF.

[@CyberchaoX]

Yeah, I've noticed that type of thing in some of these other videos on phonies. Because these pro Scrabble players have studied the dictionary, they only see "similarity to a real word by individual letters", and so a phony that sounds perfectly plausible to an amateur (usually something with a suffix that can't actually be combined with a root word, or a nonexistent compound word) is seen as "not even remotely plausible".

[@justin_tang]

0:52 Even crazier is that VAMANOS* is itself misspelled -- the word in Spanish is "vamonos" with a second O (which is not valid either). 9:40 The misspelling of American Pharoah's name was an accident. There was a social media contest to name the horse, and the winning entry was directly copy-pasted into the horse registry submission form without checking the spelling. It was later said that "horses can't spell, anyway".

[@mackmeller]

Thanks for the info on both of these! I know a very small amount of Spanish and VAMANOS did look somewhat funny but I didn't have enough doubt to actually check the spelling. And great to know about American Pharoah. Ironically, in my History of Ancient Egypt course in college, the professor once gave the students a poll and more students answered "Pharoah" than "Pharaoh"! Spellign is hard...

[@mattcanik]

Goodness omg

[@77elite9]

@@mackmeller”Spellign”

[@mackmeller]

@@77elite9 That may or may not have been intentional :)

[@77elite9]

@@mackmeller DArn it, yuo got mi.

[@Kwprules]

Feofdom is almost plausible... "feoff" means "fief" and "fiefdom" is good. Only one f makes it a lot less believable though.

[@hansle170]

Great video! Just found your channel today after hearing it mentioned on an old stream. Pretty surprised I didn't find it sooner from Scrabble-related search results. Keep up the good work on this channel!

[@mackmeller]

Thanks so much!

[@klawiehr]

CORIANTH* idea: Relicanth, the pokemon based on the real-life fish coelacanth

[@mattcanik]

THIS IS WHAT I HAD IN MIND thank you

[@hansle170]

When I saw the word, I immediately thought of a fish too. Think I saw COELACANTH in some other video game haha

[@mattcanik]

@@hansle170 yes Animal Crossing! That's the one

[@Ascension721]

The pharaoh one made me feel better lol

[@pandurendradjaja8994]

That last game: brutal. Ouch.

[@mattcanik]

My GOAT game

[@bro91wn]

On the PH(A)ROH phoney: The phoney did give back (H)AFIZ for 60, but challenging it off and playing K5 ZA for 46 is better anyway. ZA blocks the highest scoring possibilities after seeing HHOPR. Also, it would have been cool to have mentioned the valid VAvASOr or AASVO(G)el that Matt pointed out in his commentary on the VAmAnOS phoney.

[@DadgeCity]

That last game was shameless.

[@mattcanik]

you play to win the game

[@BrettMKW]

I've seen Matt play NI before although it didn't stay on the board. I'd say that's his worst phony.

[@mackmeller]

Still doesn't hold a candle to TH* by Josh Sokol imo (plus Josh got away with it!)

[@mattcanik]

oh god when did I do that

[@BrettMKW]

@@mattcanik kzbin.info/www/bejne/b33KoZaGnpJgjbc

[@Fadexpl]

LAMITROL is shifted TROLL AM I

[@Firefly256]

How did TONGLER even stay? Isn't that a high probability bingo? I thought pros would've instinctively known they never witnessed TONGLER appearing when practicing

[@BrettMKW]

I'm nowhere near the level of these guys and TONGLER would have been an instachallenge. That genuinely is shocking that it stayed.

[@gharp43]

It might be because, as you can see in the video, Stephen's rack was DEFOTV? which has no bingos, but the E in TONGLER* gave him FOVEATED

[@BrettMKW]

@@gharp43 Still better to challenge it off and score 26 with VOTED holding F?. TONGLER doesn't even form any 8's so there's no risk of ruin with that play.

[@mackmeller]

Yeah, it's definitely pretty high prob. It's possible that getting FOVEATED was a factor in Stephen letting it go, though Brett is correct that if he's 100% that TONGLER is invalid he should still challenge it off and play VOTED and leave Matt with a pile of 1-pointers that don't bingo.

[@mattcanik]

I was extremely close friends with Stephen at the time and knew he had never once studied a single list of high probability bingos. I also knew that he knew that I had been studying them hard

[@rumpelRAINS]

O man this is great. So funny

[@Mizai]

cool video

[@Vynetic]

i love the phony vids

[@plasmuds_]

phoneying is an art

[@DecoAoreste]

I would have bought VAMONOS as a word in English, given the amount of loanwords in the dictionary, but not the misspelling VAMANOS. FEOFDOM actually looks plausible to me as an alternative/archaic form of FEODUM.

[@annayosh]

Corinth is not a civilization, but a city, and it still exists.

[@GreaterJan]

I would be interested in having all the definitions and why DIRLING doesn't take an S etc

[@DadgeCity]

Words ending in -ing are mostly participles, ie. verbs, not nouns, so can't be pluralised (example: hitting). Only some of these participles have become gerunds, ie. nouns (example: finding, findings). Gerunds can usually be found in dictionaries whilst participles aren't.

[@sophiegrey9576]

69 points on the first phoney. Nice.